Even if you are not a couples therapist, chances are you have dealt with clients whose problems are based in relationship issues. In order to successfully treat these clients, you must first help them understand what their values are in these relationships, and how their behavior may be undermining their attempts to seek intimacy and connection. Combining elements of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and relational frame theory (RFT), ACT and RFT for Relationships presents a unique approach for therapists to help clients develop and experience deeper, more loving relationships. By exploring personal values and expectations, and by addressing central patterns of behaviors, therapists can help their clients establish and maintain intimacy with their partner and gain a greater understanding of their relationship as a whole. ACT is a powerful treatment model that teaches clients to accept their thoughts, identify their core values, and discover how these values are extended to their relationships with others. RFT focuses on behavioral approaches to language and cognition, and can help clients identify their own expectations regarding relationships and how they might communicate these expectations with their loved ones more effectively. This book aims to shed light on the thought processes behind intimate relationships—from the attraction phase to the end of intimacy—from a functional, contextual perspective.

Relational frame theory, or RFT, is the little-understood behavioral theory behind a recent development in modern psychology: the shift from the cognitive paradigm underpinning cognitive behavioral therapy to a new understanding of language and cognition. Learning RFT presents a basic yet comprehensive introduction to this fascinating theory, which forms the basis of acceptance and commitment therapy. The book also offers practical guidance for directly applying it in clinical work. In the book, author Niklas Törneke presents the building blocks of RFT: language as a particular kind of relating, derived stimulus relations, and transformation of stimulus functions. He then shows how these concepts are essential to understanding acceptance and commitment therapy and other therapeutic models. Learning RFT shows how to use experiential exercises and metaphors in psychological treatment and explains how they can help your clients. This book belongs on the bookshelves of psychologists, psychotherapists, students, and others seeking to deepen their understanding of psychological treatment from a behavioral perspective.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is more than just a set of techniques for structuring psychotherapeutic treatment; it also offers a new, insightful, transdiagnostic approach to case conceptualization and to mental health in general. Learn to put this popular new psychotherapeutic model to work in your practice with this book, the first guide that explains how to do case conceptualization within an ACT framework. ACT in Practice offers an introduction to ACT, an overview of its impact, and a brief introduction to the six core processes of ACT treatment--the six points of the hexaflex model and its pathological alter ego, the so-called inflexahex. It describes how to accomplish case conceptualizations in general and offers précis of the literature that establish the importance and value of case conceptualization. This guide also offers possible alternative case conceptualization for cases from different therapeutic traditions, a great help to therapists who come from a more traditional CBT background. Exercises throughout help you to evaluate the information you have just learned so that you may effectively integrate ACT into your practice.

This book is the most practical clinical guide on Acceptance and Commit ment Therapy (ACT said as one word, not as initials) yet available. It is designed to show how the ACT model and techniques apply to various disorders, settings, and delivery options. The authors of these chapters are experts in applying ACT in these various areas, and it is intriguing how the same core principles of ACT are given a nip here and a tuck there to fit it to so many issues. The purpose of this book, in part, is to emboldened researchers and clinicians to begin to apply ACT wherever it seems to fit. The chapters in the book demonstrate that ACT may be a useful treat ment approach for a very wide range of clinical problems. Already there are controlled data in many of these areas, and soon that database will be much larger. The theory underlying ACT (Relational Frame Theory or "RFT"-and yes, here you say the initials) makes a powerful claim: psy chopathology is, to a significant degree, built into human language. Fur ther, it suggests ways to diminish destructive language-based functions and ways of augmenting helpful ones. To the extent that this model is cor rect, ACT should apply to a very wide variety of behavioral issues because of the centrality of language and cognition in human functioning.

"Even if you are not a couples therapist, chances are you have dealt with clients whose problems are based in relationship issues. In order to successfully treat these clients, you must first help them understand what their values are in these relationships, and how their behavior may be undermining their attempts to seek intimacy and connection. Combining elements of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and relational frame theory (RFT), ACT and RFT for Relationships presents a unique approach for therapists to help clients develop and experience deeper, more loving relationships. By exploring personal values and expectations, and by addressing central patterns of behaviors, therapists can help their clients establish and maintain intimacy with their partner and gain a greater understanding of their relationship as a whole. ACT is a powerful treatment model that teaches clients to accept their thoughts, identify their core values, and discover how these values are extended to their relationships with others. RFT focuses on behavioral approaches to language and cognition, and can help clients identify their own expectations regarding relationships and how they might communicate these expectations with their loved ones more effectively. This book aims to shed light on the thought processes behind intimate relationships-from the attraction phase to the end of intimacy-from a functional, contextual perspective"--.

Using mindfulness-based techniques and cognitive behavioral tools, a leading expert on the use of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) teaches readers to transcend the experience of chronic pain by reconnecting with other, more valued aspects of their lives.